There are a variety of digital video formats, including MPEG, AVI, QuickTime, and Windows Media, among others. The MPEG standards, for example, are an evolving set of standards for video and audio compression and for multimedia delivery developed by the Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG). MPEG-1 was designed for coding progressive video at a transmission rate of about 1.5 million bits per second, and MPEG-1 audio layer-3 (MP3) has also evolved from this early MPEG work. The current predominant standard, MPEG-2, was designed for coding interlaced images at transmission rates above 4 million bits per second and is used for digital TV broadcast and DVD. The newer MPEG-4 is a much more ambitious standard and addresses speech and video synthesis, fractal geometry, computer visualization, and an artificial intelligence (AI) approach to reconstructing images. MPEG-4 addresses a standard way for authors to create and define the media objects in a multimedia presentation, how these can be synchronized and related to each other in transmission, and how users are to be able to interact with the media objects. Finally, MPEG-21, which is still under development, provides a larger, architectural framework for the creation and delivery of multimedia. Due to their widespread use and versatility, the MPEG standards have been adopted for a variety of consumer formats including Digital Versatile Disc (DVD), computer media files, and web-based streaming media, and Personal Video Recorder (PVR).
A PVR is an interactive TV recording device that is sometimes referred to as a digital video recorder (DVR), a personal TV receiver (PTR), a personal video station (PVS), or a hard disk recorder (HDR). Like the familiar video cassette recorder (VCR), a PVR records and plays back television programs, but, unlike the VCR, it stores the programs in digital (rather than analog) form. The PVR encodes an incoming video data stream as MPEG-1 or MPEG-2 and stores it on a computer-readable medium, generally a hard disk drive.
To view video files, a user needs a computer system or other electronic system with sufficient processor speed to render the video images adequately, internal memory to support the rendering, physical media storage space (such as a hard drive) to store the sometimes large MPEG files, and appropriate software to render the raw MPEG file into image data that can be displayed to the user. Ideally, such a system would also be small and portable in order to accommodate the mobility needs of its user.
While portable (e.g., hand-held) products are available to render digital video, music, and picture files for consumers, there is lacking in the art an easy-to-use personal media player that can be readily loaded with a variety of media files.